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It's funny that you actually think bitcoin people actually even know anything about this topic. 99% of them are clueless Internet tards who parrot the "fiat currency is teh bad!!!" slogans they hear from other Internet tards.

fiat currency, eh? Well, if Italian auto makers do have their own currency, then yes, I expect it is quite bad.

Not by that definition, but yes most stock offers have "scammy" elements. Anyway, a stock is a bad example to make your point a stock is basically ownership of something. A bitcoin represents confidence and nothing else, without the confidence it is worth absolutely zero. Before you bring up other currencies, yes they are confidence based to but they are backed by their countries might and economy.

I'd trust bitcoin over the US dollar. I might not be able to pay my taxes in bitcoin and the price might fluctuate although I know there will be demand for it for one reason and one reason alone. There is an underground economy that depends on it. Cash is still dominate for a reason on electronic currencies. We have had electronic currency for ages. It's call credit/debit cards. The reason cash is still king in the real world is because the larger economy is still heavily dependent on the underground econom

The other currencies are backed up by weight of law, which is backed up by the weight of regulations and enforcement of entire communities. Bitcoins are backed up by a collective delusion of short-term investors looking for a profit. I wonder which will be around in 10 years...

You would have had to read TFA [paritynews.com] in the original story [slashdot.org], but all indications were explicit that it would be a Mastercard debit card.

Besides, "a major international bank" is not mutually exclusive of "Mastercard." Banks issue Mastercards. Both are needed. (It's not a debit card unless it's backed by a bank, and it's not a Mastercard if Mastercard doesn't say it's a Mastercard.)

So Mastercard saying "hell no" is actually a little bit of a roadblock.

You're correct that the original story said these were debit cards, not credit cards.

I don't see how this necessarily requires Mastercard's approval. Presumably "a major international bank" (MIB) can already issue Mastercards, and guarantees them. Do Mastercard themselves approve every type of Mastercard that MIB issues?

MIB could come to a private arrangement with BitInstant, that goes like this: BitInstant maintains your balance. You use your BitInstant/Mastercard/MIB debit card. MIB credits the vendor and

Theoretically, there is a separation of interests (and risks) between the issuing bank and the clearing/processing company (i.e., Mastercard, in this case). However, processors have already shown themselves vulnerable to pressure to not process certain types of transactions [forbes.com]. And, in that particular case (Visa blockade of Wikileaks donations), I notice that Bitcoin is explicitly cited [forbes.com] as an existing end-run of this kind of financial embargo, so it's already in the awareness of the processors, and

A worldwide, multi-billion dollar company doesn't want to help promote a new competitor that undercuts their price and their control over the global flow of money? I never saw that one coming!
Oh and also, bitcoin is 100% digital so any internet-capable device can send bitcoins anywhere in the world in under 10 minutes "to clear" time. So a plastic card would just help regulate it and add another layer of complication and control by an outside force. Not 1 single bitcoin user would have gone for such a product. This story had fake written all over it from the beginning.

I think you are completely missing the reason for having a bitcoin credit card in the first place. It would have been accepted anywhere a normal mastercard would (according to tfa). This would've meant bitcoin could be used to buy stuff pretty much anywhere in real-life instead of some small online black markets or bitcoin exchanges.

They didn't say they don't approve it. They said they were never asked about it.

Seriously, Bitcoin people say "we'll have a global Mastercard-branded credit card avaolable to you all very soon". Mastercard say "Whadafuk? Who are you and how can you offer a Mastercard-branded card very soon if we've never heard of you?!". This only shows the lack of professionalism by Bitcoin.

Actually "the" reason is so Mastercard could skim off a couple percent from it as a currency conversion fee. I run credit cards so trust me, someone pays me in Euros and I get totally screwed. It's like 4%+.

Mastercard is a payment processor, they really and truly don't care what the currency they're processing bills are denominated with. The reason why they're not likely to ever accept bitcoin is that they would have to guarantee it and at present bitcoins are just a fancy ponzi scheme.

With USD you have exquisite knowledge of the sender and recipient of funds and can physically trace the movement of bills with markings or serial numbers. They can choose not to participate in legally dubious activities. Almost the entirety of the sales pitch of BitCoin is that it's anonymous and untraceable. If MasterCard can't tell the difference between a payment processed to pay for a can of soda and a payment processed to pay for 10 kilos of cocaine, they may be inadvertently abetting or committing a c

How does Mastercard have control over the global flow of money? It's saying stupid things like this for why people mock bitcoin and its supporters.

How do they not?! If you use your card in another country, the can charge whatever fees they want. If they don't like Africa, they jack up the fees. They can charge merchants whatever they want to accept the card too. If they haven't made the profit they want, they pass it along to the merchant. If they don't want money going to Wikileaks, they simply pull the plug. If they don't like what a certain vendor does, they just say they had too many instances of chargebacks and don't process for them anymor

MasterCard is a payment processor that merchants and consumers CHOOSE to use for convenience, not a boa constrictor wrapped around the neck of international commerce. If WikiLeaks wanted to, they could accept donations from dollar bills stuffed in envelopes, but they wanted an online processing instead. MasterCard shut them off because they didn't want to known as one of the companies processing charitable contributions to an international espionage suspect, not because they're some megalomaniacal superpowe

Have you ever heard of network effects? Most companies don't accept cards other than Mastercard and Visa for payment because there's no point accepting a payment method hardly anyone has, most consumers don't have other cards because there's no point having a card that you can't actually pay anywhere with, and most banks don't offer anything else because no consumer wants them. So Mastercard and Visa effectively have a strangehold on the payments market.

You could accept rocks, food, bartering, Eve Online currently, magical spells (but not on ebay lol) and nintendo 64 games as payment and your company is still a joke if you don't take credit cards. There's a thrift store next to my computer repair store that attempted to not take credit cards for 2 months. He lost so many sales and had so many pissed off customers, he had to find a processor. Speaking of processors, ask any merchant services sales rep what they think of how Visa and Mastercard control ev

Actually most companies accept more payment options than just Visa and Mastercard. Name me a company, not some niche store that 10 people shop at, that many people deal with on a daily basis that doesn't take either cash, checks, have their own line of credit, another payment service like Paypal or things like western union payments.

Have you ever heard of network effects? Most companies don't accept cards other than Mastercard and Visa for payment because there's no point accepting a payment method hardly anyone has, most consumers don't have other cards because there's no point having a card that you can't actually pay anywhere with, and most banks don't offer anything else because no consumer wants them. So Mastercard and Visa effectively have a strangehold on the payments market.

Heh, I applied for an AmEx card last week, sounds like I shouldn't have bothered;)

Then there are PIN based debit card for which transactions which Visa/Mastercard don't get their cut.

Yes and no.

PIN based debit cards have to go through some PIN network for processing. Historically, Visa and Mastercard steered PIN transaction towards their own PIN networks to get their cut (by sneaking in exclusivity clauses into processor agreements to force merchants into using visa-Interlink or mc-Maestro for V/MC logo'd PIN debit cards).

Regulations in various countries (including the US now with the Durbin amendment), opened the door to a few competitor PIN networks like Star (first data corp), Pulse

And yet I made a bunch of money mining bitcoins with a high powered dual GPU system. Wow, I sure got taken! Like 99% of other bitcoin enthusiasts, I read every last detail about how the system works, potential problems, and thoroughly protected my wallet file on cold storage (not attached to my PC). And oh look, I made money. Stupid, careless people get their money stolen whether it's BTC or USD. Don't use sketchy exchanges. Don't leave your wallet file live and then download 50 illegal software packa

So you made actual money, without doing any actual work in order to generate that "wealth" other than running a program on your computer for an extended amount of time. You created wealth without creating value.

Explain how this isn't a massive fiduciary jerk-off again? Sounds a lot like the much-maligned speculators of the futures markets to me.

You cannot eat that value or live in it. Even artists are creating more value (though that is also intangible) because they are producing works that people want to see or hear.

Bitcoins, just like most any currency, have no intrinsic value. You cannot eat dollar bills and you don't really care to own those sea shells. The only value of the currency comes from the fact that you can exchange it for products that you really need. Bitcoin has minting cos

So you made actual money, without doing any actual work in order to generate that "wealth" other than running a program on your computer for an extended amount of time. You created wealth without creating value.

Actually, he did generate value: the processing power he contributed meant that the blocks involved were found sooner, which drove up the difficulty, which made it harder for an attacker to remove transactions from the Bitcoin history (to double-spend bitcoins).

Oh and also, bitcoin is 100% digital so any internet-capable device can send bitcoins anywhere in the world in under 10 minutes "to clear" time.

Which is one of many reasons the last story smelled bad, who'd wait 10 minutes for their grocery payment to clear. The alternative would be that MasterCard or somebody guarantees the merchant gets paid before you disappear out the door with the goods, never to be seen again while your transaction bounces 10 minutes later. At the very best it would be something like having a credit card in a foreign currency where they take an exchange fee for converting your Bitcoins to US Dollars or whatever the local currency is, since I guess nobody would take Bitcoins.

The alternative would be that the payment provider requires you to have a Bitcoin balance loaded onto the card that's already safely under their control before you use it to pay for anything, which was I think exactly what they've said they're going to do.

Which is one of many reasons the last story smelled bad, who'd wait 10 minutes for their grocery payment to clear.

Ignoring for the moment the fact that from the merchant's point of view the last story was about a traditional debit card, not actual Bitcoin transfers, ten minutes is still quite an improvement over the current system, which generally takes months to "clear" the payment beyond the risk of a chargeback. With Bitcoin, after about 10 minutes (the time it takes, on average, to incorporate the transaction into the next block in the chain) the payment is effectively final, and within an hour or so (six confirmat

Have you noticed what happens in countries where the local currency is subject to extreme value fluctuations? In case you've never been to such a place: nobody accepts it, or they accept it only at an extremely steep discount. Foreign currency is what everyone (who can get it) uses.

That is, it's NOT any different than regular government-issued currency.

I have been in countries where the local currency is in the middle of being re-valued. I was unable to exchange local currency for any other, even immediately on the other side of the border. It is tough, for people trapped in that.

On the other hand, you cannot tell me that the actual cost of gasoline fluctuates whole percentage points based on old men in the Federal Reserve making reports on their money-related activities. No, that is the value of the U.S. dollar fluctuating, while the cost of gasoline

Yes, regular currencies fluctuate. But they aren't anything like as volatile as Bitcoin. IF Bitcoin catches on and IF it's infrastructure ends up being stable enough to support a major currency, THEN bitcoin may become a commonly used currency. Currently that is not the case.

The price of gasoline cost $0.25 SILVER per gallon a century ago, and it still costs $0.25 SILVER per gallon today. The rise in apparent price is due entirely to local currency fluctuations.

Silver and gasoline are industrial commodities that are both manufactured: both have to be taken from the ground and refined. Both have storage and distribution infrastructures. Not only have all these systems radically changed over the last 100 years, the relative scarcity and demand for silver and gasoline have not remained constant. Your point seems to be that the inherent value of commodities never, ever change with respect to each other, even over a hundred years. That doesn't seem to be true. Just cho

Well, because everything we do is currently tied to the inherent value of oil? All food production, all transportation, all manufacturing, all mining and extraction of any kind, all of it is a function of oil. Everything. As the cost of oil goes up, so too must the price of everything else go up, unless you happen to live in a self-supporting situation. Any realistic currency will mirror the price of oil, because everything else mirrors the price of oil! Oil is the true expression of value in our civil

I think the main difference is that with US dollars and practically any other well established mainstream currency, even if it fluctuates a bit over the course of a day or week or whatever, if you bought a loaf of bread before the fluctuation for 2.99 then that loaf of bread will probably still be 2.99 afterwards. Typical retailers don't peg their products to the perturbations of currency valuation on any kind of a short term basis. I suspect that the expectation is different with bitcoin though I haven't

Having your inputs and your outputs denominated in different currencies is always somewhat risky but while major world currencies do move relative to each other they do not generally do so at anything like the rate bitcoin does. So the risk is much lower.

Mastercard didn't do for it because it's a non starter. bitcoin is shit, and it's full of issues. If not, Mastercard would use it to make money they way they do. Mastercard only care about the ability of the currency you can charge against.

The link you provided actually disproves what you say next to it. The inventors/early adapters got rewarded. This is normal for anything that becomes successful later, but nobody can predict it becoming successful in advance. Go ahead, invest in a currency or company stock that will become uber-successful 5 years from now. You cannot. The current market cap of Bitcoin is estimated to be around 100 million - did not make anyone a billionaire yet. Compare that to Disney Corp that did not produce anything of v

Why should Mastercard care what currency you're using? They'd probably love to offer bitcoin services... then they get to charge the merchant a transaction fee AND the customer a transaction fee plus currency exchange. It would be like everyone was suddenly shopping abroad.

Oh and also, bitcoin is 100% digital so any internet-capable device can send bitcoins anywhere in the world in under 10 minutes "to clear" time. So a plastic card would just help regulate it and add another layer of complication and control by an outside force.

...and make it a useful system for POS. 10 min transaction clearing might be barely tolerable for internet transactions but I'm not interested in waiting for 10 min for my groceries payment to clear. Also 10 min is not necessarily the maximal amount of time as the block chain grows the length of time to get confirmation increases. You can do it in less time by forgoing confirmation but then you lose one of it's primary benefits.

They really need to ban bitcoin "stories" (ads) on here unless they are going to get paid for them. It's nothing more than people trying to inflate that bubble again so they can cash out. It's pitiful. May as well have stories about rumors of people becoming so damn rich from johnny woos secrets.

Yes, my feelings are frequently hurt when I miss out on obvious pump and dump schemes. Spreading false stories to inflate the price of something is "making money off of bitcoin stories". Bit coin sure is a real "thing", a really annoying thing crawling with scammers, thieves, misinformation, and a rabid fanbase that crawls into the cracks of any discussion/forum like a cockroach.

Why do you have such an emotional response to something that should really not matter to you, if you are not involved or were not involved with it?

I'm not trolling... but you're seriously over-reacting to the existence of Bitcoin unless it did something bad to you. You're acting like there are no legal or legitimate uses for Bitcoin or users of Bitcoin, which is completely false.

I think people should be allowed to engage in peer-to-peer trading of digital goods and services without a third party getting in

I'm just trying to understand what possible reasons someone would otherwise be so upset that someone else did this. It didn't hurt anyone except those who choose to get involved. And the "early adoption" period was more than an entire YEAR, and there was lots of noise about Bitcoin during that year, it wasn't some big secret private project, and the early adopters were not trying to keep it from being adopted and hoard coins for themselves but were instead trying to make sure as many people knew about it

from MasterCard...would introduce a serious flaw into the bitcoin model. Namely, the ability to override the corporate and political will of a major multinational financial processor with strong ties to the US Government.

the huge appeal of BitCoin is the ability to treat it like anonymous cash, a privilege previously enjoyed only by the upper echelons of the rich and powerful as they finance things like proposition 8 or the next GOP candidate.

", the ability to override the corporate and political will of a major multinational financial processor with strong ties to the US Government."BWahahaha.. no.The huge appeal of bitcoin is from people who don't understand macro economic.

the huge appeal of BitCoin is the ability to treat it like anonymous cash

That's not how I see it. To me, the appeal is that it's not centralized, so nobody can decide for me that I can't support Assange. And if I don't agree with my bitcoin exchange, I can just use another. I can avoid monopolies like Visa/Mastercard

... its the banks that create the largest roadblock to a BitCoin (or other anonymous cash) based debit card. MasterCard could really care less about who keeps a particular bank account topped off in dollars. You would have to find a bank willing to accept the exchange rate risk and violations of various anti money laundering regulations [wikipedia.org].

How strong did bitcoin get before investors dumped their bitcoins and developed a rumor to eliminate buying confidence and dramatically reduce the bitcoin value against the dollar? What was the bitcoin exchange rate trend before the story broke, and what is it now?

I don't think that bitcoin development is a bad idea on its face (anonymous money), and I don't see any pyramid scam, but without regulation or oversight, the bitcoin market is ripe for manipulation with impunity.

The Bitcoin ecosystem has always had trouble converting Bitcoins to something more useful. Most of the ways to get money out of the Bitcoin system involve multiple intermediaries, payment rate limits, delays, and finger-pointing between the intermediaries when the system breaks. Mt. Gox finally, as of June 26, 2012, started offering wire transfers out of their system.

The first post of Bitcoin was about creating a credit/ATM card. The original story mentions MaterCard but this is to explain how widely used the card could become. This had nothing to do with actually cutting a deal with MaterCard from them to make the card or be involved in this project. Obviously they would not be involved because they cannot hoard the money to themselves. And they rates of the card from MaterCard fees would pretty much kill the idea. I questioned the idea of BitCoin creating a card becua

Well, I'll slashvertize my game: Dragon's Tale [dragons.tl] is a gambling MMORPG where every physical object in the world is a different sort of novel gambling game. Some are skill based, some pure luck. It's like Disney World for gamblers, and it accepts *only* Bitcoin. I'm also the designer of A Tale in the Desert, a game that's been covered on Slashdot and pretty much every major gaming site (back in the day - it was released in 2003) and is pretty highly regarded.

Paying 0% transaction fees are a good deal. When you offer a good deal you expect word of mouth. Other transaction methods charge fees, often excessive fees. With the money gained from those fees and central control they pay for something called "advertising."

Now it should be obvious to you that companies that use advertising are making enough profits OFF YOU to pay for that advertising.

Now there are many parts of the BTC economy that do make profits, they should CERTAINLY have to pay for their advertis